BELOCA

Combining unique, worth-visiting locations in one app for tourists’ best local-life experience. Variety of verified, distinguished places that meet the individual needs and preferences of the visitors.

As students who travel frequently to different countries for academic purposes, we want to see tourist places in our spare time as well. However, during our multiple trips, we experienced struggles to find picturesque, unique locations to visit close to our hotel, but the renowned ones were significantly distant and reaching them took much time which was problematic for us due to the time limit of the exchange program – the purpose of our visit. As a result, we skipped the opportunity to get acquainted with the new culture, and country, and could not fully enjoy our time. We truly were disappointed. There are thousands and millions of students/employees who attend short-term conferences/exchange programs abroad as we do, they want to do sightseeing but reaching popular locations can take time, therefore they need the best locations worth visiting in local areas so that they can manage to participate in the program and travel simultaneously.  

The problem that we are trying to solve is: finding new, unrevealed locations worth visiting in the nearest locations for people who visit a new country within a short term for academic or work purposes. 

To solve the mentioned problem, our plausible solution is: to create an app that unites all the best locations to maximize visitors’ local life experience.

The name of the app, “BELOCA” (BE – best, LOCA - locations), in its core, means “be”coming “loca”l, which is aimed at introducing the life and culture of that country more to the tourists.   

In the app, the places will be categorized into several sections based on the needs of the visitors, whether they want to visit a place for its: picturesque views, tranquilness, cleanliness or cuisine. The users can also rate the places they visited, which helps others to make better choices. An important feature of the BELOCA is that users can add new destinations that they liked by themselves, with photos and comments below. Before publishing the new locations and making this choice available for everyone, it will be filtered and verified by our team and only then recommended with strong reliability and assurance.

Another significant feature of the app is its environmental friendliness. During visits, if tourist notice that the location is polluted, they can notify the BELOCA team about this with photos, after which we communicate the issue to the responsible ecological organizations. For the message about pollution, users get bonuses in the form of points which they can use as a discount in some chains of cafes and hotels. This can be a trigger for users to act in the movement, we believe. 

The target audience is people who travel abroad short-term for academic or work purposes, and our app is aimed at serving them as a mediator way to find the best recreational locations to visit in the nearest distances. Even though there are currently a plethora of websites, and apps recommending popular places for tourists, they can be the out-of-reach distance from the target destination, which is a problematic matter and can lead to the cancellation of travelling. Hence, these people need a tool directing them to fascinating locations at close distances. This is what BELOCA does. Our app will economize visitors’ finances, time, and energy, and make the trip more meaningful and memorable.   

If we take Uzbekistan as an example, companies operating an online marketplace for short-term homestays and experiences as Airbnb does not operate in our home country. Set in the heart of Central Asia, Uzbekistan hosts a range of international conferences and events, and there is a demand for such a platform. Here, BELOCA can be a worthwhile alternative.  

Focusing on Uzbekistan initially, and Central Asia as a whole, the app will be advantageous for local residents as well. There will be a special function, “guide service”, which can be a profitable employment opportunity for the locals. In rural areas of Uzbekistan, for instance, every member of the family needs to work for a living; people mostly do physically heavy work as the range of work options is limited. Even children occupy themselves by doing physically challenging work, at least at household, which eventually results in their poor academic performance, and in other aspects of their personal development. Altering the situation at a local level, we decided to make new, innovative employment opportunities for people, especially the younger generation. They can guide tourists, explain distinguished characteristics of particular cultural heritage, help them dive into the real life of the region and by that earn their living. This change in the budgeting of families can noticeably enhance the state of living and advance the language and soft skills of the locals.     

The background we come from, our hometown and our academic life success caused us to see both sides of the coin. The leader of the team, Sevinch, faced difficulty in discovering attention-grabbing destinations close to where she stayed during her trips to South Korea, Poland, and three regions of Uzbekistan; the likewise experience had Nastarin, another member of the group, while she was participating in exchange programs in Kazakhstan, rural parts of Uzbekistan, and Japan. On another side, we both come from the ancient village of Bukhara region, therefore the struggles residents in rural places face and possible solutions that can be implemented in our real-life.   

BELOCA is not our first project. Previously, we together participated in the “Technovation Challenge” international competition for girls and were global semifinalists thanks to a social app devoted to children with disabilities. During our participation in this global action to solve local problems, we could significantly develop our creative thinking, critical thinking, troubleshooting, teamworking and IT skills and implement our “SunChild” project in the community we live in. Having enough experience in launching a project, we believe that BELOCA will be an even more successful and viral project, using acquired skills and techniques. 

To have a deeper insight into the problem and approaches to the solution, we examined the existing services, and firms helping to find tourists with short-time stays in different parts of Uzbekistan. We found out that several touristic firms are operating for inbound tourism and making a tour plan, but there is no one unique platform where exceptional, overlooked destinations are united. Moreover, we conducted primary research: 1) asking the residents of the village about how would they welcome the potential employment opportunity we want to present. Soktari village in Bukhara region was opted for as a sample; 2) we examined the target audience – tourists who come to Uzbekistan for a short stay about their preferences, what features they would like to have and some recommendations. In both of the questionnaires, providing the locals with work as a guide was embraced. To practice it ourselves first, we visited one ancient home in Bukhara city, used it as an exclusive location for the visitors and guided the tourists we met. Seeing us, our peers joined us too, and the trial turned into an amusing activity for the youth of that region. The conclusions we made during this period were: if we manage the app, pricing and guides in different parts of the country efficiently, we can turn this idea into a self-employment movement and by this, have our input to the betterment of our society.  

The exceptional characteristics of the BELOCA app that separate it from its counterparts are: 1) it enables regions without Airbnb operations to utilize an excellent alternative app;  2) it is being designed to help people in finding appropriate places nearby to maximize their entertainment abroad, which will be a unique app without analogues; 3) it creates new employment opportunities for people living in rural areas, which can lead to the development in infrastructure and lifestyle in those areas; 4) it contributes to diminishing earth contamination in touristic zones because tourists can notify the BELOCA team about pollution in a particular place and get bonus points for that; 5) in case of emergency, users can contact local emergency centres or police stations thanks to the “emergency” button function in the app. We believe that the sum of all these features makes considerable positive changes in the market and eases the life of the locals.   

Our impact goals in the following year are:

• Implementing the guidance service of the app in all possible areas of Uzbekistan and by that, bringing more technology and innovativeness to the life of the villagers;
• Encouraging younger generation in rural areas to learn foreign languages by demonstrating new ways of earning (guiding tourists) and broadening their horizons in this process;
• Hindering potential usage of child labour in overlooked places by offering the alternative of working as a guide;
• Improving the infrastructure of regions by bringing tourists to the worth-visiting but neglected locations;
•  Calling people to action to save the earth (notifications of users about pollution) by rewarding them in the form of bonuses;
• Providing people with an opportunity to travel easily and quickly in their motherland;
• Advancing tourism strategy in Uzbekistan and making more people employed in this sector;
• Attracting tourists from neighbouring countries and bettering the cultural exchange.

We use Big Data, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), software and mobile application to apply to our app. As BELOCA is a new project, we heavily rely on technology as all the functions will be completed on mobile. Machine learning and AI will be functioned for users not to select the permanent location (homestaying place) each time. 

Taking into consideration that our project is a start-up, we anticipate engaging around 100,000 tourists in our BELOCA app whose experience the app will indispensable impact. We are planning to attract these visitors with the help of target advertising, ads and posters at the airports and influencers’ promotion.  

To launch our app and make it fully useable, we first need to deal with the budgeting of our project. To hire machine learning specialists, designers, front-end and back-end developers, and data analysts and be able to pay their salaries – we need to find sponsors or partner with some companies as all the expenses require funding. Furthermore, we have some HR problems: to verify places recommended by the users, we need employees who can neutrally evaluate and place and verify its affordability, reliability and accessibility.  

We are not partnering with organizations yet, but planning to.

We will partner with companies and find investors to fund our project. Also, to maintain our finance stable, we are planning to charge some cafes and hotels for promotion in our app. They will mostly be in the areas where the mostly visited locations are situated.